piece of about 150 yards in length, and 100 yards in breadth; which, as it would maintain as many as I should have in any reasonable time, so, as my stock increased, I could add more ground to my enclosure. This was acting with some prudence, and I went to work with courage. I was about three months hedging in the first piece; and, till I had done it, I tethered the three kids in the best part of it, and used them to feed as near me as possible, to make them familiar; and very often I would go and carry them some ears of barley, or a handful of rice, and feed them out of my hand: so that after my enclosure was finished, and I let them loose, they would follow me up and down, bleating after me for a handful of corn. This answered my end; and in about a year and a half I had a flock of about twelve goats, kids and all; and in two years more, I had three and forty, besides several that I took and killed for my food. After that I enclosed five several pieces of ground to feed them in, with little pens to drive them anto, to take them as I wanted, and gates out of one piece of ground into another. But this was not all; for now I not only had goat's flesh to feed on when I pleased, but milk too; a thing which, indeed, in the beginning, I did not so much as think of, and which, when it came into my thoughts, was really an agreeable surprise: for now I set up my dairy, and had sometimes a gallon or two of milk in a day. And as nature, who gives supplies of food to every creature, dictates even naturally how to make use of it, so I, that had never milked a cow, much less a goat, or seen butter or cheese made, only when I was a boy, after a great many essays and miscarriages, made me both butter and cheese at last, and also salt, (though I found it partly made to my hand by the heat of the sun upon some of the rocks of the sea,) and never wanted it afterwards. How mercifully can our Creator treat his creatures, even in those conditions in which they seemed to be overwhelmed in destruction! How can he sweeten the bitterest providences, and give us cause to praise him for dungeons and prisons! What a table was here spread for me in a wilderness, where I saw nothing, at first, but to perish for hunger! It would have made a stoic smile, to have seen me and my little family sit down to dinner: there was my majesty, the the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of ali my subjects at my absolute command; I could hang, draw give liberty, and take it away; and no rebels among all my subjects. Then to see how like a king I dined too, all alone, attended by my servants: Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown very old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side of the table, and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a mark of special favour. But these were not the two cats which I brought on shore at first, for they were both of them dead, and had been interred near my habitation by my own hand; but one of them having multiplied by I know not what kind of creature, these were two which I had preserved tame; whereas the rest run wild in the woods, and became indeed troublesome to me at last; for they would often come into my house, and plunder me too, till at last I was obliged to shoot them, and did kill a great many; at length they left me. - With this attendance, and in this plentiful manner, I lived; neither could I be said to want any thing but society; and of that, some time after this, I was like to have too much. I was something impatient, as I have observed, to have the use of my boat, though very loth to run any more hazards; and therefore sometimes I sat contriving ways to get her about the island, and at other times I sat myself down contented enough without her. But I had a strange uneasiness in my mind to go down to the point of the island, where, as I have said, in my last ramble, I went up the hill to see how the shore lay, and how the current set, that I might see what I had to do: this inclination increased upon me every day, and at length I resolved to travel thither by land, following the edge of the shore. I did so; but had any one in England been to meet such a man as I was, it must either have frightened him, or raised a great deal of laughter and as I frequently stood still to look at myself, I could not but smile at the notion of my travelling through Yorkshire, with such an equipage, and in such a dress. Be pleased to take a sketch of my figure, as follows: I had a great high shapeless cap, made of a goat's skin, with a flap hanging down behind, as well to keep the sun from me as to shoot the rain off from running into my neck; nothing being so hurtful in these climates as the rain upon the flesh, under the clothes. I had a short jacket of goat's skin, the skirts coming down to about the middle of the thighs, and a pair of open-kneed breeches of the same ; the breeches were made of the skin of an old he-goat, whose hair hung down such a length on either side, that, like pantaloons, it reached to the middle of my legs; stockings and shoes I had none, but had made me a pair of somethings, I scarce know what to call them, like buskins, to flap over my legs, and lace on either side like spatterdashes : but of a most barbarous shape, as indeed were all the rest of my clothes. I had on a broad belt of goat's skin dried, whch I drew together with two thongs of the same, instead of buckles; and in a kind of a frog on either side of this, instead of a sword and dagger, hung a little saw and a hatchet; one on one side, and one on the other. I had another belt, not so broad, and fastened in the same manner, which hung over my shoulder; and at the end of it, under my left arm, hung two pouches, both made of goat's skin too; in one of which hung my powder, in the other my shot. At my back I carried my basket, and on my shoulder my gun; and over my head a great clumsy ugly goat's skin umbrella, but which, after all, was the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun. As for my face, the colour of it was really not so mulatto-like as one might expect from a man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten degrees of the equinox. My beard I had once suffered to grow till it was about a quarter of a yard long; but as I had both scissars and razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper lip, which I had trimmed into a large pair of Mahometan whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some Turks at Sallee; for the Moors did not wear such, though the Turks did: of these mustachios or whiskers, I will not say they were long enough to hang my hat upon them, but they were of a length and shape monstrous enough, and such as, in England, would have passed for frightful. But all this is by the bye; for, as to my figure, I had so few to observe me that it was of no manner of consequence; so I say no more to that part. In this kind of figure I went my new journey, and was out five or six days. I travelled first along the sea-shore, directly to the place where I first brought my boat to an anchor, to get upon the rocks; and having no boat now to take care of, I went over the land, a nearer way, to the same height that I was upon before; when looking forward to the point of the rocks which lay out, and which I was obliged to double with my boat, as is said above, I was surprised to see the sea all smooth and quiet; no rippling, no motion, no current, any more there than in any other places. This day is published, to be continued Weekly, No. I., Price Threepence, of THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE: BY DANIEL DEFOE. PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED WITH ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD FROM DESIGNS BY GRANDVILLE. Character of the Work. "Perhaps there exists no work, either of instruction or entertainment, in the English language, which has been more generally read, and more universally admired, than the Life and Adventures of ROBINSON CRUSOE. It is difficult to say in what the charm consists, by which persons of all classes and denominations are thus fascinated; yet the majority of readers will recollect it as among the first works that awakened and interested their youthful attention; and feel, even in advanced life, and in the maturity of their understanding, that there are still associated with ROBINSON CRUSOE, the sentiments peculiar to that period, when all is new, all glittering in prospect, and when those visions are most bright, which the experience of after life tends only to darken and destroy. "ROBINSON CRUSOE is eagerly read by young people; and there is hardly a child so devoid of imagination as not to have supposed for himself a solitary island, in which he could act ROBINSON CRUSOE, were it but in the corner of the nursery. Neither does a reperusal at a more advanced age, diminish early impressions. The situation is such as every man may make his own; and, being possible in itself, is, by the exquisite art of the narrator, rendered as probable as it is interesting. It has the merit, too, of that species of accurate painting which can be looked at again and again with new pleasure. "Neither has the admiration of the work been confined to England, although ROBINSON CRUSOE himself, with his rough good sense, his prejudices, and his obstinate determination not to sink under evils which can be surmounted by exertion, forms no bad specimen of the TRUE-BORN ENGLISHMAN. It is computed that within forty years from the appearance of the original work, no less than forty-one different ROBINSONS appeared, besides fifteen imitations, in which other titles were used. Upon the whole, the work is as unlikely to lose its celebrity as it is to be equalled in its peculiar character by any other of similar excellence." Sir Walter Scott's Biographies of the Novelists. The whole Work will be completed in about Forty Numbers, Price Threepеnсе, or Ten Monthly Parts, Price One Shilling. i |